The Online Payments module in Quickschools is a very useful tool, especially for schools that offer classes online. Parents and students can just pay via credit card from the comfort of their homes.
As a school administrator or a finance staff, you need to regularly track these payments. You can get the list of Online Payments by running a Summary Report called Online Payments (with Students).
The report lists the card holder and other information about the payment along with the student info for whom the payment is for.
There is a little-known beta feature in QuickSchools called the Student Navigator. This widget, which appears when accessing the student record, allows you to easily navigate between students alphabetically, using the Previous and Next button. You can also search for students by student number or student name, and the system filters the records (similar to an auto-complete function).
Credit Cards payments always incur a transaction fee. In most cases, the transaction fee is absorbed by the merchant. So for example, if you went to an online store and purchased some shoes for $100, a portion of that transaction is kept by the payment provider as a transaction fee, typically in the realm of 3% – 5% of the total. The merchant would then only receive between $95 and $97.
When allowing parents and students to pay online in Quickschools, schools actually have the option of adding a Convenience Fee to offset the transaction fees incurred by the payment gateway.
Configure the Online Payments module where the parent or student pays the transaction fee
So from our original example above, if you were buying shoes for $100, the system would calculate a Convenience Fee, such that the merchant would receive the original $100 that was charged. So you’d end up paying something like $104, where $4 would go to the payment gateway, and the merchant would receive the original $100 charged.
Most Quickschools Report Cards simply display marks and/or letter grades for each subject being evaluated. But some schools want to show evaluations based on additional criteria.
Alvin DeSilva’s Report Card with Subject Specific Criteria
In the example above, we’ve created a report card for Alvin DeSilva using the “Three Four Galore” Report Card template. Alvin is taking English and Math. And under English, you’ll notice that he also received evaluations for Reading, Writing and Speaking. You can configure your own criteria for specific subjects, as this article describes.
STEP 1: Select an Appropriate Report Card Template
The first step is to select a Report Card template that has a section for “Subject-Specific Criteria”. If you go to the “Report Cards” > “Setup Report Cards” menu, you can click on “Change Template” to select a different report card template. The selected template will appear on the left, with configuration elements on the right. Look for the “Subject-Specific Criteria” section on the report card.
Quickschools has made it easier for parents and students to pay for their school fees from their portal accounts using the Online Payments feature via integration with Stripe. In some cases, after parents have paid via credit card, the school may need to refund these fees for reasons like duplicate, overpayment, etc. To refund, follow the instructions below:
On your Quickschools account, go to Fee Tracking > Online Payments.
Online Payments tab
Open the payment transaction to be refunded and copy the Stripe Payment ID.
Stripe Payment ID
Open a new tab on your browser, go to the Stripe website and log in to your school’s account:
As with any organization, employees (including teachers) come and go. When a teacher resigns (and is deactivated from your QuickSchools account), the teacher record is retained and remains linked to all subjects that the teacher taught. This is obviously helpful for historical records. So just because a teacher resigns, we still keep track of the courses and grades linked to that teacher.
But what happens if a teacher resigns during an active term?
Typically, subjects assigned to resigned teachers would be re-assigned to an active teacher. But depending on circumstances, school administrators may not update the subjects in QuickSchools in real time. So here we’ve built a new report that identifies active subjects linked to resigned teachers. This new report called the “Active Subjects/Lessons with Resigned Teachers” is available under “Summary Reports”:
Active Subjects/Lessons with Resigned Teachers Report
This report ONLY lists active courses linked to resigned teachers. However, there is a filter to determine whether the course is “Active” or “Orphaned”. An “Active” course is essentially a course that has been successfully re-linked to an active teacher. While an “Orphaned” course is only linked to a resigned teacher, and needs to be re-linked to an active teacher.
Although Summary Reports are pre-configured to contain preset columns and filters, the reporting tool itself can be quite powerful. So if you’re looking for a report that you’re unable to create on your own via the Report Creator, you can always commission QuickSchools to build a custom report that appears in the Summary Reports.
Here’s an example taken from language schools that need to convert 3 tardies to 1 absent. The “Absences with Tardies” Summary Report that we built consolidates all absences and tardies using the conversion described above:
The report contains columns for Number of Absent, Number of Tardy and Total Absent which includes the converted Tardies.
In a previous article, we’ve mentioned that in QuickSchools you can limit an Online Forms visibility by tags. This is useful when you want only a specific group of students to have access to an Online Form packet.
For example, you could tag your graduating students for the year as “2019”, and then use the “Submission by Tag”feature of the Online forms module to create a “Graduation Letter” form packet that would only be available to students with the “2019” flag.
Example student with the “[2019] Graduation Year” tag
